We'd have to check the Mars Constitution to see if there's anything in there
which would pertain to the construction of nuclear reactors. Personnally,
I'm against it. To get rid of their nuclear waste, they'll probably rocket
it to Earth!
Gary

I don't know how this thread got started, or where it's going, but since it
showed up in my inbox, here's my $.02: Vouchers are a good start, but the
real solution is no more public education. When did it become the
government's job to run the schools? Did I miss that amendment to the
constitution?

I've long enjoyed your public radio work, and especially enjoy it
when you say "hold on a second", then use pithy questions to unravel the
illogic of a spinmeister, or deflate some bag of hot air that you are
interviewing.

Leftist establishmentarians, at least those wrapped in the hypnotic
cocoon of their own lack of rational and spiritual self-examination, are
desperately frightened that the people (as in "of the, by the, for the")
are going to be liberated from the monopoly that the liberal cliques have
built within public education. The proverbial emperor is about to be seen
as having little or no clothing.

Two of America's leading political sociologists explore a
phenomenon of American political exceptionalism: the failure of
the socialist movement in the United States. Parties calling
themselves Socialist, Social-Democratic, Labor, or Communist have
been major forces in every democratic country in the world, yet
they have played a surprisingly insignificant role in American
politics. Why the United States, the most developed capitalist
industrial society and hence, ostensibly, fertile ground for
socialism, should constitute an exception has been a critical
question of American history and political development. In this
probing work the authors draw on rich contrasts with other
English-speaking countries and extensive comparisons within the
United States at the state and city levels, eschewing conventional
explanations of socialism's demise to present a fuller understanding of
how multiple factors--political structure, American values, and the
split between the Socialist party and mainstream unions--combined to
seal socialism's fate. Further chapters examine the distinctive
character of American trade unions, immigration and the fragmentation
of the American working class, socialist strategies, and repression,
concluding with a penetrating analysis of American political
exceptionalism up to the present day.

My wife (a spanish national of the minority catalan ethnic group)
recently pointed out to me that even though the spanish political
system was dominated by socialism for over a decade, they have a very
effective school voucher program there.

As a progressive-populist from a liberal background, I've become
rapidly disillusioned with the propaganda of (anti-religious) liberal
extremists as the educational testing & voucher debate unfolds.
Paradoxically, as a member of what is called the "religious left", I end
up having to support, on principle, the conservative elements of religious
life in american society due to the prejudices of leftists and liberals.

When one of your guests says that the voucher movement is dangerous
because it is seeking a "beach head" for conservatism in the
inner-city/minority communities that are the most dissatisfied with
the performance of the public education system, I am amazed and
disgusted by the liberal bias. As some of the public participants on your
program noted, the liberal academic on your panel seems to have come from
another planet than the one inhabited by actual parents and teachers.

In the "real world", the public education system has *long* been a
"beach head", and more, for a failed, dysfunctional leftist-socialist
agenda. I seems extremely ironic that educational leftism has ended up as
a vestige of white privilege which is promoted primarily, but not
exclusively, by white suburbanites!

Inner cities are an unpleasant reminder of the failures of social-
engineering programs that are based on leftist ideology. It is
amazing how the (supposed) "academic" apologists for the elitist
liberal public education "agenda" are incapable of taking
responsibility for the moral, ethical, philosophical and practical
failures of their ideology. The cynical political calculus they
promote contains a subtext indicating that as long as the dominant
culture in the suburbs can send its kids to public schools that are
"good enough", we can let the "unworthy" people in inner cities rot
under decrepit pubic education systems, while simultaneously
overlooking the highly unprincipled exclusion of conservatives and
religious perspectives from the democratic processes involving public
education.

Liberal social engineering programs are premised on the idea that a
liberal "elite" (which is really an atheist priesthood), supported by
public funding, will dictate an "enlightened" ideology to the masses.

No wonder parents and community don't want to participate more in
public education. Why would people want to conform to the
dysfunctional power arrangements implied in the politics of public
education?

The arrogance of the "experts" (such as your guest), that come out of
liberal academia becomes all the more obvious when it becomes apparent
that they think the deception and lies that they have been long advocating
are going to be swallowed by the people for much longer. The assumption
that they can keep deceiving people about the glaring conflict of interest
they have in maintaining the bureaucracy by using specialized terminology
and "research" (frequently just obscurantist, fashionable nonsense) is
incredible.

The supposedly "enlightened" liberal ideology contains a "dangerous" form
of quasi-atheism, at least to the extent that it is *silently* premised on
excluding religion from public life.

The *real* "great danger" is that the bureaucratic dictatorship that
leftists and liberals have tried to establish in education and social work
for several generations may actually be scrutinized by the people in terms
of its moral, ethical and practical failures. *Of course* allowing more
families to take their own tax dollars back in order to participate in
private (or religious) schools is a giant threat to the liberal
establishment's power structure.

Conservative perspectives uphold the need for ethical/spiritual
values in *public* life. Leftist establishmentarian perspectives tend to
be hostile to the idea that "diversity" should include tolerance of even
the suggestion that religious values can play a creative, dynamic role in
*public* life.

A spiritually maturing society that seeks love, healing,
transformation, atonement, redemption and enlightenment through
nearness to "the sacred" doesn't need to be coddled by elitist pseudo-
scientific "experts" and all the incompetent bureaucrats and corrupt
politicians bobbing in their philosophical wake.

Its time to let *true* democracy work. If that means that the people will
have to be trusted with responsibility, and that the dictatorial liberal
bureaucrats will have to let the people find out if alternatives work or
not, so be it. I would much rather allow a diverse range of education
options and experiments (including those that are supportive of
educational perspectives framed in terms of conservative and religious
values), than see the corruption involved in liberal public education
continue, unexamined.

...
ORLANDO PATTERSON: ... the situation itself is one in which there is not
a simple movement, harmonious movement. There is a change-- positive
change is always accompanied by friction; however, our perception of
what's happening is also paradoxical in the sense that both the right and
the left, as well as the Afro-American leadership, all have strong
interest in perceiving the situation as in negative terms.

DAVID GERGEN: Tell me more about that. That's really--

ORLANDO PATTERSON: Well, for the right wants to castigate the
government for the failures of its--all its programs on behalf of the
poor, the Afro-American poor. It makes sense they exaggerate the problem
to show how we're losing ground because of the horrendous government
interference in policies, so that welfare dependency and so on is
increasing and it's increasing because of rotten government policies. For
the left, the liberal group, exaggerating the problem, emphasizing that
America is chronically racist seems--is mistakenly believed that this will
keep the pressure up for government to intervene even more. And the
criticism here is just the opposite of the right, which is that things are
bad because the government hasn't gone far enough, or there's still, the
place is still chronically racist, so there's still a need for more
government intervention.

And for Afro-American leadership emphasizing racism as being--America as
irredeemably racist--enhances their broker role, obviously, and again
mistakenly is based on the view that by presenting an image of almost no
progress, you will increase the possibility of greater intervention. And
it's also partly due to the tragic commitment to the ideology of the
victim, a very deterministic view, which I'm afraid most Afro-American
leadership has adopted, which tends to assume that by perceiving of
Afro-Americans as victims you increase the chance of intervention on their
behalf. Now, unfortunately, this worked. This is the strategy of the 60's.
It's interesting that the great Supreme Court decision, which struck down
school segregation, was based on a determinist view, i.e., social
scientists were brought in to show that it created victims, rather than
the view that this is the right thing to do. ...

In a city very familiar with the squabble that accompanies
education policy, Boston is an appropriate setting for Judy
Burnette, an 11-year veteran of the parent choice movement. As
Program Development Coordinator for Northeastern University's
Urban Law and Public Policy Institute (ULPPI), Burnette's voice
joins a growing faction of minorities who support parent choice
reforms like school vouchers, although the "face" of the voucher
movement still tends to be white, upper-class, religious
conservatives. "People will say to me, 'How can you be black and
support vouchers?'" Burnette says. "But the real goal should be
high-quality education, however it can happen." by Maggie Adams